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Heavenly Father thank You for this opportunity to talk about your bountiful produce and the blessings that you give us please give us with them and help us have an opportunity this morning to really share some ways that we can work through some of our difficulties in this area so that the food that so lovingly is created in the field can be a blessing to your students that can help their minds and help their bodies and help them learn so much better and your name we pray Lord Amen so one of the things that's really has put this as a passion on my heart is some of these statistics here. Our students are getting American society in general as having a lot more diabetes. Young adults. To side 2 thirds of Americans are overweight and then in our communities and our churches one in 6 is food insecure and I know that we have that problem at our school P.A.A. our kids are getting diabetes at incredible rates right now. The projectile is for students. That were born in 2001 out of 3 Caucasian food insecure is when. This runs the whole gamut Whether there's no food at home but it basically means that they don't know where their next meal is coming or if they're going to have a next meal or maybe the mother at home doesn't eat dinner so that there's enough food for the kids so that there's food issues at home where they're not having enough food. And so that's one in 6 in fact at P.A. we had a student sigh at Cortland Adams academy here we've got about $26280.00 students one of our students we found out over the break. They were having a struggle at home that they didn't have enough food they're wondering where their next meal was and so it's not just a problem out there it's a problem in here too that something that we need to take care of so that's what it means by food insecure great question so for students one in 2000 kids 12001 out of 3 Caucasian child children are going to get diabetes before they die one out of to. Latino and African-American will get diabetes you for they die $2000.00 is a 1st year when it's projected that students will die psychic things instead of it talks like it's all time they children will die before their parents we are on a horrible crash course with the way we're eating if you look at the leading causes of death the United States which ones of on those are not food related Any guesses. Yet so so accidents is one I mean if you look at the left most of them are very directly food related either immediately food related or has a huge impact so accidents is one but I would imagine if you drill down with accidents there would be some of that you know your brain was and we can clearly see you had an accident or maybe your alcohol Yeah exactly so there's a whole bunch of an ass accident room I would imagine are directly related to your body have anything else on there do you see that's not food related. Pardon. Suicide isn't directly food related however we all know that when you're eating healthy and your body is healthy your mind is healthy and there's less depression and there's less rates of suicide when you're treating your body right there's other issues but when you're eating right your mind is clearer and you're able to think better and so all of the top reasons that we die in a state be made better if we were taking care of ourselves and eating right so this is one of the reasons for me that this is definitely. A passion and why we need to be doing this but there's good news this actually came out of a Harvard study which is something that we all know but it's nice to see it out in the world is that if we're eating healthy we are going to. Kids eat more fruits and vegetables there can be more fruits and vegetables so if we show these kids the food we have out there is an option in there you need more of it one of the things I do at school is I have. What I called is a shared table so this is I do this for partly for the food the kids who are in to cure so I have this shared table and I always try to keep a big bowl of fruit on it anybody can take something from this table at any time and this me something that you can kind of interbreed as well you won't have to just put fruit in it maybe you could put some veggies that are some finger veggies or something that would be easy for students to come and grab but I always try to keep a big bowl of fruit there so that's something easy for them to grab so I try to keep that there. I keep this table of fruit out all day long so I only serve food in small window so if I have students that come in early in the morning and they're hungry then that table is always out there so any time they can come into the cafeteria and they can grab a piece of fruit and then I just try to keep it for all. And then part of the idea of the shared table all they're doing this in public schools in different places with the idea the shared table is you have students who are into care and then you have students who bring lunches from home and they throw half of it away so maybe they have some good granola bars in there maybe they have now which sells a lot of sugar but you know isn't all of ours are packaged knives or something in their lunches and so instead of the students throwing them away which they do students can also put packaged food on there and so I monitor there's not a lot of that going on but that was kind of the ideas so that students weren't wasting food they had something out there and they could eat it all the time whenever they wanted to and I feel really try to make all the slides available any of these underlined in the slides or you can look at it later any of the ones that are underlined are links with some information out there so why am I here. I'm here because this is something that I've been working on for the last few years it's really important to me we've got all this great farming that all of you are doing and we're just not getting the this incredible food and Neff into our kiddo so this is I'm here because I'm really passionate about it and I grew up my grandparents of always had a farm always you know he's a doctor my mother's going to nurse but they always had gardens you know and they were always growing something my father was in the military so we moved around a lot. We didn't always have a great opportunity for a garden because once we start to get it rolling a be the time to move specially since my family loves fruit and that takes a little bit longer to get established so unfortunately growing up we didn't always have a great garden but it's something that I've been around I was in the military and then after the military I got out and got my use my G.I. Bill to go to Coney school so I went to Coney school and so I'm coming from that perspective I've had professional training in COLANERI And so I just think that we're just not doing a great job in our schools with our food and I think there's so much we could do to do better and so that's kind of been my mission for the last couple of years and I'm continuing on that with that in fact next week or next I 2 weeks from now who knew that we had an avenue this Food Service Association I just found out and I've been working one of our schools one of our larger schools for 2 years and I had never heard of it so another part of what I want to try to do is get some tools out there through the avenues reserve association with some recipes and some of that so if you have ideas on how we can help get that message out of their struggles that you're having that we kind of work on pushing from the top down let me know about that too later and we can we can work on that as well so in order to make this happen we've got to change a little bit the mindset of farmers as well as definitely changing the mindset of chefs and teamwork to really make it all happen. I like what she said here and we'll talk a lot about this what war is she would sneak this Reaper taters in the chili that's something. For those of you have kids that maybe they had problems getting the vegetables and sometimes that's something I definitely do at this call when I make chili I add a lot of ice for vegetables in it when I'm making was on the air if I put a ton of vegetables and it so there's a lot of things that the students already like and are comfortable with eating that I'll add a lot of extra vegetables into. Mac and cheese as one if you. Bake potatoes or if you boil some carrots Imperium and invite a mix you can add those into some homemade mac and cheese and they get that darker color that they're used to with Kraft mac enjoy running cheese unfortunately at home or you can give that color and it has just as a little bit of sweetness which I haven't seen in the kids have noticed or minded at all and there's all sorts of stuff out there on how to do that and how to make that happen so this is a question for you guys a little bit and I'd love to hear from you so what are some of the press struggles that you're having with your kitchen staff to try to get some of those vegetables in what we were doing in Boulder which I need surgery and school is so some of those vegetables that the kids are unfamiliar with there's a couple ways to go out you can do tasting days and the more you get stuff out there and having the students try them specially when it's coming from the garden there was a huge difference between a tomato bought at the store and it's made of fresh off the vine it's it's the difference is incredible it's all fresh apples and all that so when you're. Giving students is opportunity to try some of that fresh produce specially if they know that it's come from the garden and she will have their school that huge and they get a try that now you do you still have the challenge with them trying to integrate the food into the kitchen and we'll talk about that a little bit more if you want his paws on that but that's definitely a problem for a process lots of thoughts lots of and so that's it's a problem that I think that a lot of our schools had which is interesting because we don't fall under some of the U.S.D.A. guidelines in general for schools which is a good thing and a bad thing but it sounds like the way a lot of our schools are going right now it's a very bad thing because the U.S. under the last administration it did change again to be less healthy but under the last administration not talking politics at all just food rules under the last administration all of the bread products any grain product had to be at least 51 percent whole grain every meal had to have fresh fruits and vegetables. Food is supposed to be cooked from scratch we're not doing that in our schools and that's what I'm also trying to work on because if you're getting food in that's prepackaged the health benefits to that food is very minimal whereas if you're getting the whole grains but you can make little adjustments you know you can start getting the staff to make little adjustments instead of doing vegetal inks with white bread maybe less to whole bread the kids don't care you know they're just glad that they're getting a veggie Lincoln So that's on every day then maybe you can start interger ating like the hot dogs we have here that are made with carrots if you guys try though. They're so good and I came from a background that we ate meat at home occasionally not very often so I've had real hot dogs and veggie how dogs fantastic they've got great favor so she when you add the chili in the Carmel eyes onions on top that's really good at and kids are going to like that they just have to try it and so it's that's kind of that integrating in there a little bit so I had to so the question was. What are the issues a safe to safety issues with storing and saving for is that's a great question there is across the U.S. there's a. It's called a garden to cafeteria so if you google I look at Garden cafeteria but I've got some slides on that later where we're talking about food safety policies and there's a number of school districts that are having garden school gardens so this is a civically for gardens at your school not necessarily if you're a commercial farm and you're trying to get in because those are totally different guidelines and yeah farm schools tell a different this is garden to cafeteria very specific So again that's like something that's associated with a school that's a garden and what they've done is one of the links I have on here is some guidelines to that so you can look at it and you can take there's word for word if you want all the all the policies after this length are totally fine with you taking a word for word or you can modify it to fit with your specific school but yeah that's a great question so the question is how do we figure out how much produce we need because obviously when you're growing it you have to back it up you have to do that planning where every just ordering from Cisco that's much easier so this is. This is a great farm that I'm functionally got burned up a couple of years ago but this what's wrong with this picture if you're trying to do a school garden what's wrong with this fix Yeah exactly see what 2 big problems of summer time no reason school and all of these plants are the same size so if you are the Gardiner for a school garden any you have cases and cases and cases of bell peppers that come at one time that may be a little bit harder for the kitchen to take care of so having to session gardening having session art is very important they talked about yesterday in the market gardening so whatever you can do to extend your season is really important but thinking about OK well the cafeteria is using a case of lattice so they're using case a lot as a week so then we need to plant it so that it comes right throughout as long as we can go into the school year one of the things I think that a great job with this video talking about is during the summer time they were able to harvest and save things so when you're thinking about having a school garden think about stuff that can be saved do I want to do Romaine all summer long for my school garden probably not could I do maybe some spinning maybe I could do lots of tomatoes so I think about things that you can really either process into something else and save for a long time or something that shelf stable for a long time I know which is hard to do when talking about the garden but really think about tomatoes are incredible you can be using bell peppers as well so if you had a whole bunch of case the bell pepper you could cut them up in freeze them and so be thinking about that when you're thinking about your school garden. For a long time into the winter one of the things as a chef that I absolutely love having the garden is herbs if you want to bother up your chef have some herbs in the garden that they can have when I buy herbs you know I get a huge bag of time you know how much time I go for not that much or all maybe get a ton of QUANTRILL I've loved one show but the kids get tired of it when I have this much that I have to use that one time whereas if it's in the garden and you can give your chef a bunch here a bunch there that is amazing and the food taste so much better the kids love it so herbs are wonderful thing to have in your school garden it just makes the food so much better of course of all of the food is coming packaged and you have to do baby steps so maybe cherry tomatoes that's something easy that the students can eat one thing that's a really great place to bring the fruits and vegetables is the salad bar we do a salad bar at our school the kids love a salad bar way more than prepared salads because this kid doesn't like mushrooms and this kid doesn't like tomatoes and this kid doesn't like any and so what do you think happens if you put all of that on a salad. None of those kids are going to eat the salad so when you have a salad bar you can have everything separate with lots of dressings on and for them to choose from so as a gardener I'm trying to integrate the agriculture with a cafeteria This is a great place to do it just think about things that would be great on the salad bar one of things I love to do with our salad bar is to add in something more colorful and unique so instead of just having orange carrots maybe having red carrots and when I have cauliflower I find the purple color for you know how many of those students and teachers have never seen purple color far or red carrots WOSM I have staff coming up to me these are educated have been this teachers that have been around healthy food their whole life don't know right you know what red carrots are quite are white hair it looks like they're just shocked to see these colors and they ask me what is this in the students ask you know what is this purple come or did you diet and then you get to talk about all the nutrients that comes in and so it can and there but having some different color and stuff to really make your salad bar pop is really important. What's really important is the communication piece with the garden and the cafeteria just because you make a ton of cherry tomatoes and all of these beautiful vegetables doesn't mean the cafeteria has the time or the understanding on how to to work with that so if you can sit down with them before you even decide what seeds you're going to plant in before even diocese find out what they're using and this may be you know in your case with the carrots and not knowing how much shorter This may take a little for the time now you know as you're going through the rest of the school year. Check in with them and say hey let's do here's some things that I think I can grow that you know that are that I have been growing in the past tell me you know do weekly count and let me know how much you're growing or how much you're using in the cafeteria and so it takes a little bit of that it takes a little bit more time because it's easy to just phone up Cisco and you know get your order and have all of that but it's not as good and it's not as delicious and is definitely not as healthy as the action is how do you work with the kitchen to really figure out the numbers and then how as the gardener do you work with it to figure out OK well how am I going to make that happen so that I have what the kitchen needs and that is a great question some people who could probably answer that really better than I can on how much to plant would be. Dan Greenfield he's working with Wiemar and he's got a lot of great information. Jeff birth who has a garden that Milo and he's been working with his kitchen there and they're still they're still building that relationship you know this is all about relationships or so working on that but both of those people would be great resources for you and I'm sure Vivian probably know someone well. Oh yes so the question was do I know of any schools that kind of enforced or in courage or expanded the minds of students to help them eat more fruits and vegetables so absolutely the Boulder Valley School just straight Berkeley. NASA is now doing it and so what they do you a great one that's a lot of fun which is you know we could tie lives of 5 lessons to as well is eat the rainbow and so it's encouraging students especially this is one that's big for the elementary school. Is to eat the rainbow so that you look at the South or if you put this if you can set up a whole rainbow on your plate of different colors and they get a sticker or you can make it a bigger and get something a better prize with a win courage is soon to get different colors you know and then they would talk about the nutrients for different ones and why it's important to eat the rainbow why it's important to get some of those colors in and that was really successful for them in fact I was at an elementary school in Boulder and these students had been eating having salad bars at the school for 4 years and so they were used to it wasn't something new and surprising I came in with a bunch of rainbow carrots and you would have thought I was giving out some sort of candy with how sighted these students were to try these different care but they had also you know they've been doing this program for a while and so it's something that they were for milieu or with and they were comfortable with and so it's it's a marketing process it's a training process is an education process and that's why we're talking a little later it's so important to get your team and you've got to get everybody into it together you've got to have that relationship with the kitchen staff with the admin you've got to bring everybody together so as human I mentioned before here is a typical Avenue. Lunch menu so looking at this menu from some of the stuff that we've talked about before and what ways do you think we can add more vegetables into it I don't want to. Use. OK so let's decide about cooks in the raw vegetables we already know we can put those on the salad bar easy you know now that are different so how can we put add more cooked vegetables into this menu or how can we make this menu more nutrient dense by keeping the same stuff in the kids comfortable with the normal things how could we as more stuff into it. Yeah exactly we get a lot more vegetables in the spaghetti sauce one of things that I like to do and which would also be a great way for preserving vegetables in the summertime is to make a ratatouille isn't a no Ratatouille is so Ratatouille is and there's wrestling to recipes on here but the Ratatouille is basically you Sauter onions in your garlic and then you put in your egg plant your summer squashes your tomatoes and you put all of these you can either bake it or you can make it in a pot pot what's great about ready to eat is then you can put it in jars and save it and then that can be the base for spaghetti sauce that can be the base for lasagna costs it can be the base for so many things and you have years of Kimi in there you have your summer squash you have your eggplant or garlic your tomatoes you put bell peppers in there and all of that's in there and the tomatoes kind of overpower the color which is really good when you're working with kids because then you know they're not like oh growth eggplant and like a plant for they can enjoy it because it's something that's for Mill year and then you can even make right to a and I like to do in kind of big one in chunks and then put it into jars then if you're going to make it's made of soup you can put that in the vitamins blended up so it's a pure A and you have all of those vegetables in there and it just looks like almost made a sip Yeah absolutely so thinking about the cool weather vegetables and being able to do a stir fry them and you can have that on top of your pa sell like you can make a pasta with a red sauce with it or pasta with maybe. A cream sauce that you can even do with coal fire if you have the right I wonder if you do not have the right blender doesn't work so the question was how do we get more grains and I was definitely motivated by that this one and realizing I'm not getting their brains in my diet at all. Pizza what if you made a pesto sauce that had a bunch of greens in it and you put the garlic in it you don't have to just use basal for pets a sauce you can use spanning 2000 years a rule I mean a rule that is a little bit harder to get the students eat sometimes and you can put kale in there and that's a good one and that's a great way is to put on the salad bar what I like to do and there's a I guess some debate about it what I would like to do on the salad bar is put some when I put the chaos on the south bar I cut it really thin and I massage it with a little bit of all of oil and salt it makes it so much more enjoyable for the students because it's not quite so harsh and you're not taking the nutrients away and you're adding a lot of flavor no yeah so that was great and from the 77 seasons there's a recipe. Seventy's and 2nd the 7 secret where you can do there's a bread and you put all the vegetables inside with the tofu and then you have it and it's really appealing it's in the easy to grab Now again we need to be all that is a great one specially when your kitchen team is totally onboard and excited about it because you definitely have to do a little bit of hand-holding a little bit of kind of bring them into the fold because one of the things even though I love everything from the garden I want to have organic produce I want to have fresh produce for then what happens is bugs and I may not have enough time in the morning to clean up all the bugs that are in something which kind of goes back to here as having bubble or and I know it's more difficult for the revelers and washing and have a washing think this is something that I know my Lowe's been struggling with is you go thing in the garden and the bring into the kitchen you've got this beautiful map a cabbage and a chef cutting into it and what's in the middle of the cabbage. Worms are slow which happens when you have Gore getting produce so anything that you guys can do to make it more mercial looking when it comes in will really help that transition and I think that if you are really faithful with that in the beginning you know you could start to ask why it was helped later but if you just bring them a bunch of produce from the garden and there's starred in it and it's not as clean and pretty as they're used to that's going to be a little bit harder and so if you can take that extra time to clean it up a little bit that will really help not say that you have to worry about having necessarily imperfect produce and this is where having that conversation with the kitchen I can use ugly fruits and vegetables super easy that's not a big deal out all it's if you're having that conversation find out you know what they want the orange is for they can do orange slices or they can have them on display are they going to be making orange juice or maybe they're using the orange juice in a tofu orange chicken style or what you know what are they doing that and see if you have that conversation then you'll know OK well this is going on the salad bar and this is what this needs to look like this is going to go into a staff bread and so it's OK if there's holes in it from the bugs because it's going to be all cooked in something so that's not a big deal but it's going to be really hard to get the students to eat some kale on the salad bar that has a bunch of holes in it. You can do D.I.Y. as to google the bubble or basically what it is is you have a big thing of water and it puts makes a bubble so it helps get some of that dirt and stuff off your greens and so it's not really harsh for the grain but it helps get some of that stuff off of there the question was on when I was on 3 potatoes and sweet potato fries Yeah pay attention you know if you go out to eat what's on the menu and is it a restaurant that students like to go to or not we've talked of are super popular. My 1st year at the school and I've been doing it since I made tacos and talk is a great one that I usually try to do one that's like a soya product filling you know like so I curls and make it look like chicken and or the little dark soy ground beef and then I try to do the other one be lots of vegetables so last year I did. Which is kind of what we're going to hear last year what I did is I did sweet potatoes in mushrooms the referee called reportable mushrooms which is a little bit more expensive I just use regular mushrooms for a filling of the tacos and I like I put this out here and then other kids are going to go for this I absolutely did and one of my students my little high school student boy he said if this was a girl I would be dating it and for a high school boy that's a pretty good call for. It was something that I kind of I didn't think for sure that they were going to enjoy so absolutely sweet potatoes are a fantastic thing to grow they have tons of nutrients you can do sweet potato fries which isn't that hard for the kitchen in fact there is a chopping device that you just put the take potatoes in it go through and as wedges and you do that for sweet potatoes you could do that for regular Tadros and that's way better than doing the tater tots are doing you know deep fried fries you can just bake them in the oven and they're fantastic So yes the potatoes is a fantastic one and then you can put it like they said you can put in your chilies and put it in your McEntee cheese it's a great one to use. Yeah that's a great one is to do instead of doing we're getting a little to do like the spy eyes are and you. Forget the squash to do zucchini that is something that I tried as I did as we get a squash instead of doing it as actual noodles I did as a side and I have this really good v and parmesan cheese I put on it and some really good begin butter because it was something that was. Really different to the students so I made sure that it had plenty of seasoning and everything on it and they really enjoyed it but I haven't done it yet as. A replacement for spaghetti noodles because for our volume and how many people are who are doing the cooking it's really hard to do some of those things because that takes more time and. We have we have 280 students but we have an open campus so a lot of the students will go out to talk about all or something some of our food insecure students some of them bring their lunches but we do have a program that we're initiating now for free to do free or reduced lunches for from some of our students are on scholarship and need it. But yeah so we do about $40.00 to $80.00 students every day for lunch I always have a vegan option it is vegetarian obviously I try to go light on some of the the dairy products and stuff it's not over with it last year I had a whole bunch of students that were really excited about being V. and wanted to be big and and I made a ton of was portions for the Wii and and this year I've got like 5 students you know if I've got just a couple students to do it and they don't always come to lunch so for me some meals I'll make that will be totally big and nobody will even know I've got salad dressings on the south bar I've got a vegan ranch and if big and Caesar that are my standard none of the kids know that those are big and I have students that are adamant I have to have students that aren't advantages we have a really wide variety a lot of our students I don't know a percentage I need to do a survey and find out a lot of our students eat meat at home and so for me for the situation that I am in. If I went really hard core V M N stuff I wouldn't be getting as many students and they went against me vegetables because that would be too who weird for them and so I think it kind of depends on who your audience is so know your student it depends on where you're at the question was how I had I know how they were interested in being and they told me and the ones that were going to be big and were all excited about it and they would tell me how happy they were that I would make it a good option for them and then I also have students are gluten free so I need to make sure that I don't have gluten options have been free options for them so there's a wide variety kind of there that you have to think about so thinking again about it from your perspective when you're thinking about your kitchen staff are having to make all of these extra things so thinking about ways that you can help them integrate your food and kind of build that relationship easier to make the transition for them easier because they'll know that once they start serving it the products are way better again make sure that everything comes in really clean the products are better they taste better the students will like a more but it's just that kind of baby steps you have to make those baby steps and a lot of folks they've a lot of the kitchen folks specially even at the bigger schools they've grown up cooking or working in the kitchens at our school and we do a lot of processed food we do a lot a lot a lot of veggie meat and veggie meat isn't that healthy you know it's as an alternative and it's nice to kind of have a thing but our folks are so used to doing that it's going to be a process to kind of get them to change their minds robo crew Those are amazing robo Koos are so fantastic they're expensive but they can cut down your dicing time incredibly and there warning is another company out there that has a lot of stuff that's great and kind of go through sizing temperatures of them. One of things I really wanted to kind of highlight as well as we're going through this is it and we talk about this I'm going through but it takes a team you've got to get everybody involved and show them the benefits you've got to think a little bit from their perspective on how you kind of bring them into the fold of how important is to have your programs these are a couple of my students here. That at that I have the opportunity of teaching them how to harvest lettuce and how to pick things from the garden so it's always I always love when I have students in the kitchen and I get to teach them some of these things so once you've convinced your kitchen staff to do some of these things you need to get the marketing out there so the students can get excited about it what's coming from the garden here. One of the school districts decided to do a vegetable or fruit of the month and kind of highlight it in things and that was kind of your idea of how to that education process and kind of forcing them a little bit is having a fruit of the month or a vegetable of the month and kind of highlighting that a little bit yeah if it is a separate energy entity I'm having a lot of research on that but there are other regulations so if it's you know my body Fred has a garden over here and I want to start using his produce in my kitchen there are some as a rules that have to go with that but if it's your school's garden. This will have some good resources for you on having a policy and what you need to do in the hand-washing for the kids and God is really in depth and give you some great information on what you need to be doing in the garden. To meet the food safety requirements and what also you need to be doing in the kitchen to meet those requirements so this is got some great resources on there for you. Please feel free to shoot me an email give me a call if you have any questions or if there isn't some way I can kind of help communicate your kitchen team for you and kind of share a lot of it with them I've got a ton of recipes that I use that I have. Made so that they're more for a cafeteria style they're they're all set at 25 portions so that kind of helps with folks when they're trying to figure out recipes and and what they can be making in the kitchen so they don't have to do the math as much on that and I will be in 2 weeks meeting with the head of the evidence Food Service Association so if you have anything that you would like me to communicate why he's in the cafeteria with me learning some of the recipes please do because I really think that we need to be working from the bottom up and the top down to make these changes in our schools we really need to be feeding our kids better the public schools are doing a pretty good job of it now a lot of schools have public schools have salad bars they've got more whole foods and we're really lagging behind in as Adventists something we know this is something that we're really good at the need to do a better job of doing it our own schools and sharing. 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